Exciting Writing!

Recently, I asked students for a 'writing baseline'. I asked students to write me 'about a life event of your choosing.' I did not give any further criteria than that at this time because I like to see in this first piece what is their natural inclination.

For instance, if asked to write, what do they do? Do they naturally brainstorm before beginning? Do they naturally break their work into paragraphs or do they write a solid block of text? Do they add specific details, proper capitals and punctuation, sentence variety, interesting words, etc?

From their sample, I can then see what is the area of need for each student and also what are the most predominate needs of the class. This then creates the criteria of my expectation for their next writing pieces. 

The next writing task will have very specific criteria laid out as I guide students towards improvement in their written communication.

I have started reading over these samples and am very excited to be working with these young writers. There is so much potential in this room for funny, clever, detailed, interesting pieces!

I look forward to returning their samples and getting to work on the revision process. I am using this form to assess where they are at in September and as you can see, it provides quite specific feedback on where they need to take their writing next.

You'll also notice that these feedback points are adaptable to a wide variety of writing forms...both non-fiction forms and fiction forms. We will likely thus be working on these writing skills all year long. 

We will also be looking at the Gr. 7 writing exemplars to see what a typical Level 1 through 4 looks like by year end.

To quote a cool T shirt I once saw: WRITE ON!